Google more than doubled device shipments in 2017

Alphabet shared its Q4 2017 earnings, but beyond the numbers on any financial statement provided there’s something very interesting that happened for Google in the last year. It managed to double device shipments in 2017. The massive increase proves that Google’s hardware business is gaining serious momentum as the company prepares to go all-in on physical products to complement the software business in the future.

Google revealed that tens of millions of products were sold. Most of the success was credited to Home, Chromecast, and Chromebook devices. Meanwhile, no significant updates regarding Pixel devices were given.

The hardware business along with the Google Store and Google Play on their own made $4.69 billion in the fourth quarter to close 2017.

As a whole entity, Alphabet generated $32.3 billion in the final quarter. Google’s parent company, however, faced a massive write-down due to the U.S. government’s new tax bill. Alphabet experienced an “additional tax expense of $9.9 billion” as the year came to an end. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which passed in December, affected Alphabet because of its foreign earnings.

It’s the tax bill that caused Alphabet to actually lose more than $3 billion in the quarter. Alphabet’s stock price took a tumble in after-hours trading on Thursday and pre-market trading on Friday.